Triumph in Arms (22 page)

He was running toward Marguerite.

R
iver’s Edge was deathly quiet. The men had left before dawn, departing without breakfast, with no fanfare or word of farewell. A duel was not usually an affair to the death, and to treat it so was like asking for ill fortune; still, that careless sangfroid seemed to fly in the face of reason. Or perhaps, Reine thought, she was simply pained that Christien had not kissed her goodbye.

She could not bear to think of where he was going or why, much less of what might happen. Dread consumed her. She was torn between visions of Marguerite confined somewhere, crying in terror or pain, and Theodore hacking at Christien while knowing he could do little more than defend himself.

Oh, but was that true? Christien had never agreed to stay his hand completely. He had exercised great patience in his quest for vengeance. Might he not feel it took precedence? What if he decided a fatal, or near fatal, injury for Theodore was more likely to remove the danger to Marguerite than letting him return to wherever she was being held?

Where was Marguerite while this duel was taking place? Who was holding her? Who did Theodore expect to injure her, possibly even kill her, if he was defeated? The questions revolved endlessly in Reine’s mind, had since the moment Theodore’s note was put into her hand.

There was only one answer that she could see. It had to be in the same place, with the same person who must have hidden him away so long. And who should that person be, the only human being who loved him, had always cared for him as if he was her own?

Who else except Demeter?

He could not think his old nurse would harm Marguerite. No, not even at his direct order. If Marguerite was to pay for any harm inflicted upon him by Christien, then he must exact the price himself.

Surely he would not hurt his own daughter? She was so tender and innocent, so trusting. And yet she had called him a
loup-garou,
a monster of the night.

Reine flung out of bed with her mouth set in a straight line. She dressed with haste, pulling on her riding habit. She could not depend on the outcome of this dawn meeting, refused to sit with her hands folded while others decided the fate of her child. There should be time while the duel was in progress to get to Demeter’s cottage and back again. She could not take the back way, for that led past the site of the duel, but there was another, longer route. If she could not snatch Marguerite away from such a feeble jailer, then she had no right to call herself a mother.

Scant minutes later, she was leaning over the neck
of her mare, racing down the drive. At its end, she turned onto the river road that ran past the Pingre plantation on its way to New Orleans.

Bonne Espèrance was shuttered, the covered door openings like empty eyes as it sat at the end of its overgrown drive. The whitewash on its walls had turned gray with mold and mildew, the canvas on the gallery floors had begun to rot and dead leaves lay in drifts on the steps and before the front door. Reine trotted past, ducking under a tree limb broken off in the recent rainstorm but still hanging from one of its shading oaks. Beyond the house was order of a sort, as the land was still being worked, but drainage ditches were clogged with weeds, barn and stable doors sagged and a miasma of stagnant water and outdoor privies hung in the hot morning air.

At the back of the big house was a garden that had become a jungle of overgrown shrubs, wild roses and briars hidden in knee-high grass. Leading from it was a trail that meandered away into the forested no man’s land between Bonne Espèrance and River’s Edge. Dismounting, looping the mare’s rein around the arm of a lichen-covered statue at the garden’s corner, Reine set off down the trail at a run.

The playhouse was half-buried in honeysuckle and wisteria vines. Its windows on either side of the center door gave back only reflections of the surrounding woods. The door stood open and an orange tabby sat on the sill with its paws tucked under its chest. As Reine stepped inside and glanced around, the cat rose with dignity and stalked off toward the big house.

Nothing moved inside the small cottage. Its single room smelled of wood smoke, fried food and unwashed bedding. An iron pot sat over dead coals in the single fireplace. Against one wall, a cot of canvas over a wood frame served as both bed and settee. Through the open back door could be seen a small porch where sat a bench holding a wash basin. Next to it was the first steps of an outside staircase that led to a minuscule sleeping loft. Over its post was draped a man’s coat with a pair of boots beneath it.

The silence was deep, broken only by the buzzing of a fly against a windowpane.

No one was there. No one had been there for hours, perhaps not since the day before.

Whirling in a flare of skirts, Reine ran back toward the big house. This time, she approached from the rear. Mounting the steps with caution, she crossed the lower gallery to reach its center set of French doors. They were not barred. The handle turned under her hand. She caught her breath, hardly daring to think what that meant, as she eased inside.

Bonne Espèrance had been constructed in the French fashion so all rooms opened into one another. The only way to get from one end of the house to the other without passing through multiple salons and bedchambers was to use the galleries. The central doors where Reine entered opened into the summer dining room, which, in common with most of the major rooms, had double doors on either side for airflow during the summer heat.

More silence greeted her there, along with festoons of spiderwebs and dustcover-wrapped tables, chairs,
sideboards and even chandeliers. A deserted feeling hung in the long room, which made Reine believe Theodore’s mother was unlikely ever to return from her sojourn in France.

She had left her injured son behind, left him in the care of only an old nursemaid. Had she really expected Theodore to join her in due time as he said, or only thought to outdistance the scandal and him with it? Reine didn’t know. She should have known as his wife, she thought. That not knowing seemed as much a tragedy as the rest of it.

Shaking off the unwanted introspection, she skirted the dining table under its dustcover of old linen sheets, stepped over the long tubular shape of the room’s carpet, which had been rolled up and pushed to one side. Tobacco leaves had been sprinkled inside for protection from insects, for the dusty-sweet smell rose from the roll as her skirts brushed against it. Smothering a sneeze, she made for the enclosed staircase that rose between the dining room and the butler’s pantry on the north end of the house. She eased up the treads as quickly as she dared.

The stairs decanted into a salon wrapped in more dustcovers. In that main room, which, like the dining room below, had access to both front and back galleries through French doors, she hesitated. Four bedchambers opened from it. On the north front corner was the bedchamber she had once shared with Theodore. Marguerite’s old crib was in one corner of it, and her old toys, just as they had been left two years before. It was both habit and instinct that urged her toward it.

“
Madame,
why you here?”

She stopped abruptly as Demeter emerged from the gloom, standing in the open door of that room. “You know why,” she answered after a moment.

“M’sieur Theodore, he’ll not like it.”

Reine gave her a hard stare as she lifted her chin. “I don’t care what he likes. I’ve come for my daughter. You can hand her over to me or I will take her.”

“She be the child of M’sieur Theodore.”

“And he’s been such a devoted father to her these past two years, hasn’t he? You know he cares nothing for her. Did he tell you to kill her if he doesn’t come back from the dueling ground.”

“Never would he do this thing!”

“I can show you the letter threatening it. Step aside, Demeter. Marguerite is going home with me.”

Inside the room, there came the creak of a wooden bedstead, the rattle of slats. Marguerite called out in high-pitched distress. “
Maman!
”

Reine expected her to come running. Seconds ticked past and she didn’t appear. By degrees, the explanation for it came to Reine. She could not come. She was being restrained, perhaps tied up in some manner. Rage unlike any she had ever known washed through her.

She stepped toward Demeter and kept moving. She was going to her daughter if she had to walk over the old nursemaid.

At the last moment, Demeter shifted to one side. Reine ran the last steps that took her into the bedchamber.

It was in chaos, as if someone had raged around it,
inflicting as much damage as possible. The doors of the armoire hung askew. The clothing she had left behind, evening gowns and capes, day gowns unneeded while she was in mourning, had been dragged from it and cut into ribbons. The toilette articles on her dressing table were smashed, with powder and perfume spilled into the wreckage. The bed had been torn apart, the mosquito
baire
ripped from its metal rings, pillows disemboweled of their feathers and cotton pulled by handfuls from great cuts in the mattress. Lying on its foot was the sword used to inflict all the damage, a cavalry saber that had once hung over the fireplace mantel, beneath a portrait of Theodore’s great-grandfather as he had appeared when he wore it as a musketeer of the ancien regime.

Reine noticed the destruction with only the outer fringe of her attention. Her gaze went at once to the crib that stood in the corner. She plunged toward it.

“
Maman,
” Marguerite cried with tears filling her eyes and her arms thrust through the crib’s slats in supplication. The small bed was too short for her, so she lay at a cramped angle across it.

Reine cursed softly, repeating words she had heard Christien whisper as she saw the strips of torn sheeting that encircled her daughter’s small waist and ankles and that bound her to the slats. With hands like claws, she dragged at them, desperate to free her. They were knotted several times and of linen too stout to give to anything except a sharp blade of some variety.

“Get me a pair of scissors, a knife, anything,” she said over her shoulder. All the time she spoke, she
was pulling at the bindings around Marguerite’s waist, trying to push them down over her small hips.

“M’sieur Theodore won’t like this at all,” Demeter said in querulous repetition. “Wait for him,
madame.
Soon, soon, he comes. Ask him. He will give her to you if you ask.”

She was to beg, as if Theodore had the right to keep her child from her. Perhaps he did in a legal sense; she didn’t know. But no right existed that allowed him to take her and tie her up like an animal. Reine half turned toward the nursemaid, stabbed a finger toward the saber. “There, hand that to me at once.”

“Think,
madame,
” Demeter said, even as she bent to take up the weapon and pass it to Reine. “You will only anger him.”

“He doesn’t know what anger is,” she snapped. Leaning over the crib, she lifted a strip of the binding, passed the blade under it and slashed upward. With vicious strength then, she cut the other strips that held Marguerite, feeling as if she could tear the crib itself apart with her bare hands.

The final strip of linen came unwrapped. Leaning the heavy sword against the crib, Reine snatched away the pieces and flung them from her. Reaching with both arms then, she picked up Marguerite and caught her in a close hug, rocking her back and forth. And she couldn’t tell whether that movement was to calm her daughter or soothe her own shuddering rage.

“Oh,
madame,
” Demeter said in a tone like two sheets of foolscap rubbing together, “you don’t know what you’ve done.”

Reine didn’t answer. With Marguerite’s arms still around her neck and her small legs clamped about her waist, she strode across to the door once more. She passed into the large salon, ghostly under its dust cloths and dimness caused by closed shutters, then turned toward the dark entrance to the stairwell. Shifting Marguerite so she sat on her hip, Reine turned in that direction.

Theodore appeared ahead of her, rising from the lower floor like a demon from hell. A grim smile tugged the good side of his mouth upward. “Going somewhere,
chère?
”

She halted where she stood. He didn’t pause but stepped into the salon and bore down upon her. Reine glanced around a little wildly. Another staircase led down from the front gallery beyond the salon’s French doors. But those doors were locked inside their barred shutters. She could never get through them before he was upon her.

“I told you he would not like it,” Demeter muttered, backing away from them both, sidling along the wall until she reached a protective corner.

Reine barely heard her as she turned back toward Theodore. “Step aside, if you please,” she said with resolution. “I’m taking Marguerite home.”

He laughed. “Now, why would you do that when you are both where you belong?”

His hair hung in sweaty strings, she saw, his shirt limp and damp with perspiration, and dirt smudged his pantaloons. A long streak of red ran down his sleeve, spreading from a cut in the fleshy part of his neck, just
above the collar of his shirt. She moistened her dry lips, holding her daughter closer as Marguerite began to make small whimpering noises. “It seems you survived the duel. Christien, Monsieur Lenoir, must have honored his intention to let you live. It’s over. You can let us go now.”

“What of this?” He hunched his shoulder toward the neck wound. “I said nothing about being bloodied. I don’t call this honoring anything.”

“Did you think he would allow you to slice him to pieces at will? You could not be so foolish.”

“Are you quite sure he didn’t?” He gave a snorting laugh, jerking his chin toward his injury again. “With the exception of this pitiful attempt at defense, of course.”

Horror congealed her blood, turned her heart as cold as ice. Was it possible Christien had failed to protect himself? Where was he now? Where were the others, the seconds and the doctor who should have seen to Theodore’s wound? Had they gathered around Christien as he fell, leaving Theodore to fend for himself?

“He…he wouldn’t do that,” she whispered. “Marguerite isn’t even his child.”